The food and beverage industries (e.g., production and serving) regularly clean and sanitize their industrial equipment to maintain product quality and ensure the public health. Production residuals that remain on industrial equipment compromise product quality and promote the growth of pathogenic microorganisms. Thus, the food and beverage industries typically clean and sanitize their industrial equipment to reduce microbial population to safe levels. Similarly, other industries that use fermentation processes to produce pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, nutritional supplements or biofuels also clean and sanitize their production equipment to maintain product quality and consistency.
Breweries, for example, routinely clean industrial equipment with solutions of caustic such as sodium hydroxide. Sodium hydroxide is inexpensive, but imperfectly suited for cleaning brewery equipment in, e.g., a clean-in-place process which contains an atmosphere of carbon dioxide because residual carbonic acid will react with the basic hydroxide to form carbonate. Further, the hydroxide must be neutralized after cleaning, and before being discharged from the industrial equipment, to minimize any impact to the environment. Thus, cleaning compositions are needed that are better suited to food and beverage industries, such as breweries, and more compatible with the environment.